Day: March 25, 2009

What happens on the immense battlefield for the control of Eurasia will provide the ultimate plot line in the tumultuous rush towards a new, polycentric world order, also known as the New Great Game.

Our good ol’ friend the nonsensical “global war on terror”, which the Pentagon has slyly rebranded “the Long War”, sports a far more important, if half-hidden, twin – a global energy war. I like to think of it as the Liquid War, because its bloodstream is the pipelines that crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of the planet. Put another way, if its crucial embattled frontier these days is the Caspian Basin, the whole of Eurasia is its chessboard. Think of it, geographically, as Pipelineistan.

All geopolitical junkies need a fix. Since the second half of the 1990s, I’ve been hooked on pipelines. I’ve crossed the Caspian in an Azeri cargo ship just to follow the $4 billion Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, better known in this chess game by its acronym, BTC, through the Caucasus. (Oh, by the way, the map of Pipelineistan is chicken-scratched with acronyms, so get used to them!)

Terrorist group al-Qa’ida is likely to fragment in the coming years but an attack on Britain involving chemical or nuclear weapons is now “more realistic”, the Government warned today.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith highlighted the danger posed by new technologies and failed states around the world as she published an updated counter-terror strategy.

The report – known as Contest Two […] contains a stark warning about the likelihood of an attack involving a “dirty bomb”. […]

Ms Smith was asked whether there was a greater threat of a CBRNE (*) attack than five years ago. She replied:

“There is the potential, given the international situation, what we believe to be the aspirations of some international terrorists, that it could be.” […]

Ms Smith called for the use of “civil challenge” to those who hold extremist viewpoints. She cited the example of the Muslim activists who recently protested at a homecoming parade in Luton for British forces returning from Iraq. […]

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(*) CBRNE is the acronym for chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and high-yield explosives.

President Obama basically said that we can’t demonize every investor who earns a profit, because “we are all in this together.” Sorry, but I am going to have to call a big fat “bull-shit” on this one.

When Obama said “we” did he have a mouse in his pocket? Obama, and his family have a very opulent, slave-built roof over their heads. He travels on the public nickel, his children attend an exclusive Washington, DC private school that has organic food on its menu, and has health care that covers everyone in his family from head to toe and side to side and inside out.

Even though he and every member of the administration, Congress and the Supreme Court are not hurting for anything, the bastard (sorry if your parents weren’t married when you were conceived) Wall Street banksters are receiving billions of dollars of government welfare and are not so good about being in “this together” with us.

At his March 24 press conference President Obama demonstrated that he is capable of understanding issues as presented to him by his advisers and able to pass on the explanations to the press. The question is whether Obama’s advisers understand the issues.

Obama’s advisers are focused on rescuing banks and the insurance company, AIG. They perceive the problems as solvency and paralyzing uncertainly or fear. Financial institutions, unsure of their own and other institutions solvency, hoard cash and refuse to lend. Credit is needed to get the economy moving, and the Federal Reserve and Treasury are doing their best to inject liquidity and to remove troubled assets from the banks’ books.

This perception of the problem and the “remedies” being applied, might be causing a greater problem for which there is no solution. Obama’s approach, and that of the previous administration, requires massive monetization of debt by the Federal Reserve and massive new debt issues by the Treasury.

The US-NATO war in Afghanistan is the largest and longest war in the world.

On October 7 it will enter its ninth calendar year and with the projected deployment of at least 30,000 more American and thousands of more fellow NATO nations’ troops this year it promises to go on indefinitely.

It is the second longest war, both on the air and ground fronts, in the United States’ history, with only its protracted involvement in Indochina so far exceeding it in length.

The Afghan war is also the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s first armed conflict outside of Europe and its first ground war in the sixty years of its existence. It has been waged with the participation of armed units from all 26 NATO member states and twelve other European and Caucasus nations linked to NATO through the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, the Partnership for Peace and the Adriatic Charter with the first-ever invocation of the Alliance’s Article 5 mutual military assistance provision.

The twelve European NATO partners who have sent troops in varying numbers to assist Washington and the Alliance include the continent’s five former neutral nations: Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland.

The European NATO and partnership deployments count among their number troops from six former Soviet Republics – with Azerbaijan, Georgia and Ukraine tapped for recent reinforcements and the three Baltic states represented disproportionately to their populations – although Western officials and media refrain from using words like invasion, empire and occupation that were tossed around so profligately in the 1980s.

The Golden Rule

“That which is hateful to you do not do to another ... the rest (of the Torah) is all commentary, now go study.” - Rabbi Hillel

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

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